5 ms·

I would seriously consider toning down the marketing speak. This project is making very bold claims, without citations, while trying to appeal to an often skept

I would seriously consider toning down the marketing speak. This project is making very bold claims, without citations, while trying to appeal to an often skeptical crowd (developers). "Graph databases are considered more powerful and modern than relational databases," ... okay? According to what benchmark and for what workloads? A statement like that is an immediate turnoff because it is dismissive of 30 years of database development. "In many languages the slightest error in input data can cause a program to seriously malfunction. Beads has special rules of arithmetic and a robust mathematical model, that makes it extremely difficult to have a serious malfunction." I don't see how "special rules of arithmetic and a robust mathematical model" makes it "extremely difficult to have a serious malfunction." Replacing "Unix, SQL, Rails, Ruby, RSpec, Templates, HTTP, HTML, CSS, DOM, jQuery and Javascript" in one language? How does this replace Unix? HTTP? It's not an operating system or a transport layer. My goal isn't to crush someones idea, but consider your audience: developers.

ithkuil 5y ago
> I don't see how "special rules of arithmetic and a robust mathematical model" makes it "extremely difficult to have a serious malfunction." The only way would be to have arbitrary precision integers by default and thus no overflows ever. (IIRC smalltalk was something like that, but it was long time ago since I used it, so I'm not sure)
- deckard1 5y ago
  bignum as the default integer is quite common in lots of languages[1]. Notably, Lisp, Scheme, Erlang, Python. Scheme is a bit interesting in that they have a "numeric tower", which contains rationals and even complex numbers (implementations were free to implement a subset of this tower, at least as far as R5RS, not sure today) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_arbitrary-precision_arithmetic_software#Languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_arbitrary-precision_ar...
  - travv0 5y ago
    Just to elaborate a bit, in CL, numbers are FIXNUMs by default but are promoted to BIGNUMs if needed. CL also has rational and complex numbers, which it probably got from Scheme but I'm not familiar with that history.
- rst 5y ago
  Integer types in current versions of Ruby and Python both have arbitrary precision (as is also true for lots of other languages these days). That's not enough to make either intrinsically bug-free...
  - ithkuil 5y ago
    python does have bignum integer, but there are subtle things, like if you divide an integer with an integer you get a float, where you do lose precision: >>>(100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000/2+1) % 2 == 0 True if you want to get an integer you have to use the relatively recent "//" operator: >>> (100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000//2+1) % 2 == 1 True in smalltalk you'd get a Rational or something like that.
- stonewareslord 5y ago
  That's definitely one way to solve the issue, but I wouldn't say it's the only way. In Rust, you can configure Clippy to ban the usage of +-*/ and require explicit behavior of each calculation. For example, 10u8.checked_add(10) returns an Option<> (similar to Maybe in Haskell) so you can handle overflows. You can also use 1u8.saturating_sub(100) which will not allow wraparound but values will saturate at the max/min.
- magicmouse 5y ago
  Excel achieves its robustness (and it hardly ever crashes) by protecting the user against arithmetic errors, and circular reasoning. Excel doesn't offer infinite precision arithmetic, that is rarely needed in practice. Null pointers are something that plagues Java, which are primarily caused by having some computation out of sequence. By using the State-Action-Model pattern, most of Beads code will be devoted to rendering the model on the screen, and that one-way transfer of information can be made very robust, provided you have a closed arithmetic, which it does.
magicmouse 5y ago
Beads is like VB6, and Oracle Delphi, an all-in-one language that shields you from the complexities of learning all these external tools and having to learn so many languages. To someone whom i guess a long-time developer, you might dismiss it as too simplistic for your purposes. For example you can skip using Unix Bash and use Beads like Python as a scripting language. You can build a very nice client/server product like the "Robin Hoody" app, using the publish/subscribe functions built into the language without ever learning how to encode/decode a packet, as the runtime makes it easy to do this. So in that sense the language does offer a virtual transport layer. Sure, you may need to drop down and encode/decode a websocket message buffer, but the point of Beads is to permit writing in a single language, without having to learn CSS and the whole pile of complexity that accompanies modern development. You can't make an easier stock quoting system (one of the examples), because it has been reduced to the absolute minimum number of lines. The protected arithmetic of Excel is of proven utility, and i am merely imitating it. I replace #UNDEF with U, and #ERROR with ERR to make it less verbose, but protections abound in Beads both at compile time, and at runtime. In a graph database universe, you don't need scalars, tuples, lists, dictionaries, queues, hashmaps, etc., because a single more general data structure accomplishes that you need. Graph databases are quite hot; Neo4J has grown leaps and bounds, and Oracle was forced to come out with one. I am sure that most existing systems continue to use older tech, because that is always how it goes in computers. People are still running COBOL in some places, because it is so damn fast and works perfectly at what it was built to do. I have no doubt that we will see existing tech which works fine continue to be used for another 50 years. It makes sense to make an easier environment that is still capable, but much simpler to learn and use, and that is the goal of Beads. As for the skepticism of crowds, my product is out there, and has no major bugs in it, and hopefully will find an audience that likes this approach.
- bawolff 5y ago
  No offense, but that's the most BS sounding pitch i've ever heard. You're fixing the garbage-in, garbage-out problem? Have you also invented strong AI and solved the halting problem? Edit: you should replace your website with the first page of your language reference pdf. That's a better pitch and more interesting than anything you've written here.
- 5y ago
Koshkin 5y ago
> are considered more powerful and modern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
bawolff 5y ago
Honestly, i think graph db being more powerful is one of their more reasonable claims. Graph db trade off a more flexible data model (which some people would call power) against performance/scalability. Whether or not that's a good trade off in your domain is a very different question. Edit: although based on the docs, the graph db seems roughly a data structure where nodes can point to each other (i dont see anything about complex queries, or managing concurrency, or even persistence). By that definition, i think even c would be a language with an embedded graph db (structs and pointers)
- catblast01 5y ago
  > Honestly, i think graph db being more powerful is one of their more reasonable claims. Graph db trade off a more flexible data model (which some people would call power) You can represent graphs in the relational model so that’s simply bullshit.
  - blacktriangle 5y ago
    Neo4j had a great demo, load up the IMDB database, then solve six degrees of Kevin Bacon with SQL vs with Cypher. The Cypher is a one liner that runs immediately, the SQL is a mess that almost brings down the database. For certain types of queries, recommendation engines being a prime example, graph databases are awesome.
    - catblast01 5y ago
      For one, Neo4j is an implementation and SQL is not. As for clarity, SQL, although by far the most widespread query language is a shitty language in many respects... again a separate issue from the relational model. In any case you’re conflating a storage engine and a query language. There’s no reason an RDBMS implementation cannot be tuned for graphs, and there is no inherent lack of generality in the relational model which seems to be the prior posters claim. Whether Neo4j is a useful piece of software is a different topic.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    But can you do it well? Infinite self-joins are not elegant in relational algebra. They are very not elegant in SQL (recursive CTE's are soo ugly). Last of all, they are super inefficient in almost every RDBMS.
zubairq 5y ago
Hi, I would like to chime in here on your comment on the marketing speak of the Beads project. I know the author of Beads, and was happy that he gave me a shoutout for my own project, Visual Javascript. Anyway, I have been following this new coding space for a while and I was also the initial angel investor for a project called Eve (the follow up for Light Table) which was an excellent project made by someone called Chris Granger (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12817468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12817468). Anyway, I agree that the presentation of the Beads language could be improved massively, but the Beads language itself has some very interesting features, so should not be ignored. I think reading through all the comments on this hacker news thread it would be very useful to know what parts of Beads actually interest readers, and how they would present/market Beads themselves if it was their own project. This could be very constructive. For me personally it is the time travelling debugger that it interesting in Beads. What is it about Beads that you find interesting?
- jasonshaev 5y ago
  I am vaguely familiar with Light Table and Eve (coincidentally my college roommate grew up with Chris but I don't know him personally). It's been awhile but my recollection is Light Table/Eve had a more targeted set of selling points -- a killer IDE with some slick features I hadn't seen before and then a new language designed to be written as prose. Regarding Beads: time travel is definitely a cool feature. Most languages have some kind of step debugger but the experience can often be improved. Having a built in graph DB could be an interesting selling point too. I'd love to see a quick example of what having a graph DB built into the language enables. For instance, this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27315018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27315018 cites a Neo4j demo that, in a few lines of code, shows me something their product does "better" than SQL. I would love to see, on the Beads front page, a small (5 lines max?) code blurb that shows me something Beads can do harder, better, faster, stronger (or whatever ;) ) than other languages. I don't quite know what that is, but I imagine the author has some thoughts :). Happy to connect more if you'd like.
  - zubairq 5y ago
    Sure, connect with me. You can find my details online.

ithkuil 5y ago

> I don't see how "special rules of arithmetic and a robust mathematical model" makes it "extremely difficult to have a serious malfunction." The only way would be to have arbitrary precision integers by default and thus no overflows ever. (IIRC smalltalk was something like that, but it was long time ago since I used it, so I'm not sure)

deckard1 5y ago
bignum as the default integer is quite common in lots of languages[1]. Notably, Lisp, Scheme, Erlang, Python. Scheme is a bit interesting in that they have a "numeric tower", which contains rationals and even complex numbers (implementations were free to implement a subset of this tower, at least as far as R5RS, not sure today) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_arbitrary-precision_arithmetic_software#Languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_arbitrary-precision_ar...
- travv0 5y ago
  Just to elaborate a bit, in CL, numbers are FIXNUMs by default but are promoted to BIGNUMs if needed. CL also has rational and complex numbers, which it probably got from Scheme but I'm not familiar with that history.
rst 5y ago
Integer types in current versions of Ruby and Python both have arbitrary precision (as is also true for lots of other languages these days). That's not enough to make either intrinsically bug-free...
- ithkuil 5y ago
  python does have bignum integer, but there are subtle things, like if you divide an integer with an integer you get a float, where you do lose precision: >>>(100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000/2+1) % 2 == 0 True if you want to get an integer you have to use the relatively recent "//" operator: >>> (100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000//2+1) % 2 == 1 True in smalltalk you'd get a Rational or something like that.
stonewareslord 5y ago
That's definitely one way to solve the issue, but I wouldn't say it's the only way. In Rust, you can configure Clippy to ban the usage of +-*/ and require explicit behavior of each calculation. For example, 10u8.checked_add(10) returns an Option<> (similar to Maybe in Haskell) so you can handle overflows. You can also use 1u8.saturating_sub(100) which will not allow wraparound but values will saturate at the max/min.
magicmouse 5y ago
Excel achieves its robustness (and it hardly ever crashes) by protecting the user against arithmetic errors, and circular reasoning. Excel doesn't offer infinite precision arithmetic, that is rarely needed in practice. Null pointers are something that plagues Java, which are primarily caused by having some computation out of sequence. By using the State-Action-Model pattern, most of Beads code will be devoted to rendering the model on the screen, and that one-way transfer of information can be made very robust, provided you have a closed arithmetic, which it does.

magicmouse 5y ago

Beads is like VB6, and Oracle Delphi, an all-in-one language that shields you from the complexities of learning all these external tools and having to learn so many languages. To someone whom i guess a long-time developer, you might dismiss it as too simplistic for your purposes. For example you can skip using Unix Bash and use Beads like Python as a scripting language. You can build a very nice client/server product like the "Robin Hoody" app, using the publish/subscribe functions built into the language without ever learning how to encode/decode a packet, as the runtime makes it easy to do this. So in that sense the language does offer a virtual transport layer. Sure, you may need to drop down and encode/decode a websocket message buffer, but the point of Beads is to permit writing in a single language, without having to learn CSS and the whole pile of complexity that accompanies modern development. You can't make an easier stock quoting system (one of the examples), because it has been reduced to the absolute minimum number of lines. The protected arithmetic of Excel is of proven utility, and i am merely imitating it. I replace #UNDEF with U, and #ERROR with ERR to make it less verbose, but protections abound in Beads both at compile time, and at runtime. In a graph database universe, you don't need scalars, tuples, lists, dictionaries, queues, hashmaps, etc., because a single more general data structure accomplishes that you need. Graph databases are quite hot; Neo4J has grown leaps and bounds, and Oracle was forced to come out with one. I am sure that most existing systems continue to use older tech, because that is always how it goes in computers. People are still running COBOL in some places, because it is so damn fast and works perfectly at what it was built to do. I have no doubt that we will see existing tech which works fine continue to be used for another 50 years. It makes sense to make an easier environment that is still capable, but much simpler to learn and use, and that is the goal of Beads. As for the skepticism of crowds, my product is out there, and has no major bugs in it, and hopefully will find an audience that likes this approach.

bawolff 5y ago
No offense, but that's the most BS sounding pitch i've ever heard. You're fixing the garbage-in, garbage-out problem? Have you also invented strong AI and solved the halting problem? Edit: you should replace your website with the first page of your language reference pdf. That's a better pitch and more interesting than anything you've written here.
5y ago

Koshkin 5y ago

> are considered more powerful and modern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word

bawolff 5y ago

Honestly, i think graph db being more powerful is one of their more reasonable claims. Graph db trade off a more flexible data model (which some people would call power) against performance/scalability. Whether or not that's a good trade off in your domain is a very different question. Edit: although based on the docs, the graph db seems roughly a data structure where nodes can point to each other (i dont see anything about complex queries, or managing concurrency, or even persistence). By that definition, i think even c would be a language with an embedded graph db (structs and pointers)

catblast01 5y ago
> Honestly, i think graph db being more powerful is one of their more reasonable claims. Graph db trade off a more flexible data model (which some people would call power) You can represent graphs in the relational model so that’s simply bullshit.
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  Neo4j had a great demo, load up the IMDB database, then solve six degrees of Kevin Bacon with SQL vs with Cypher. The Cypher is a one liner that runs immediately, the SQL is a mess that almost brings down the database. For certain types of queries, recommendation engines being a prime example, graph databases are awesome.
  - catblast01 5y ago
    For one, Neo4j is an implementation and SQL is not. As for clarity, SQL, although by far the most widespread query language is a shitty language in many respects... again a separate issue from the relational model. In any case you’re conflating a storage engine and a query language. There’s no reason an RDBMS implementation cannot be tuned for graphs, and there is no inherent lack of generality in the relational model which seems to be the prior posters claim. Whether Neo4j is a useful piece of software is a different topic.
- bawolff 5y ago
  But can you do it well? Infinite self-joins are not elegant in relational algebra. They are very not elegant in SQL (recursive CTE's are soo ugly). Last of all, they are super inefficient in almost every RDBMS.

zubairq 5y ago

Hi, I would like to chime in here on your comment on the marketing speak of the Beads project. I know the author of Beads, and was happy that he gave me a shoutout for my own project, Visual Javascript. Anyway, I have been following this new coding space for a while and I was also the initial angel investor for a project called Eve (the follow up for Light Table) which was an excellent project made by someone called Chris Granger (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12817468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12817468). Anyway, I agree that the presentation of the Beads language could be improved massively, but the Beads language itself has some very interesting features, so should not be ignored. I think reading through all the comments on this hacker news thread it would be very useful to know what parts of Beads actually interest readers, and how they would present/market Beads themselves if it was their own project. This could be very constructive. For me personally it is the time travelling debugger that it interesting in Beads. What is it about Beads that you find interesting?

jasonshaev 5y ago
I am vaguely familiar with Light Table and Eve (coincidentally my college roommate grew up with Chris but I don't know him personally). It's been awhile but my recollection is Light Table/Eve had a more targeted set of selling points -- a killer IDE with some slick features I hadn't seen before and then a new language designed to be written as prose. Regarding Beads: time travel is definitely a cool feature. Most languages have some kind of step debugger but the experience can often be improved. Having a built in graph DB could be an interesting selling point too. I'd love to see a quick example of what having a graph DB built into the language enables. For instance, this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27315018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27315018 cites a Neo4j demo that, in a few lines of code, shows me something their product does "better" than SQL. I would love to see, on the Beads front page, a small (5 lines max?) code blurb that shows me something Beads can do harder, better, faster, stronger (or whatever ;) ) than other languages. I don't quite know what that is, but I imagine the author has some thoughts :). Happy to connect more if you'd like.
- zubairq 5y ago
  Sure, connect with me. You can find my details online.